THE PEACEKEEPER'S
ALIBI.

01 · 1:19The alibi

HannahCanada calls itself a peacekeeper. This investigation argues that it continues to wage a colonial war against First Nations and Indigenous peoples, while presenting the machinery of domination as ordinary policy. That is the reason for this poster. Look below the dove: children removed, reproductive coercion, bodies harmed, land taken, resistance watched. These are connected attacks on a people's ability to continue as a people. We will follow that argument through Canada's own records and the investigations in the Feline Union archive. Keep exploring while we talk. Close the poster, open a file, come back, or zoom in. The conversation will stay with you.

EthanSo the accusation is much larger than a country failing to live up to its advertising. It is that the peaceful image helps the violence continue. But where do the Geneva Conventions enter this? Think of three broad kinds of harm: grave bodily harm, forced displacement, and destruction or appropriation of property. The Fourth Geneva Convention treats specified forms of these acts against protected people and property as grave breaches. Its wartime protections are a measure of how seriously humanity has already named these harms. A state does not make violence harmless by giving it a departmental name. And it does not determine whether an armed conflict exists simply by refusing to announce one.

02 · 0:57Two instruments

AdrianExactly. Keep two instruments in view. The Geneva rules govern their applicable armed-conflict situations; calling colonial domination a war does not, by itself, establish every legal requirement for a war-crime charge. The three categories printed in the poster's treaty section come from the Genocide Convention: serious bodily or mental harm, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children. With the required intent to destroy a protected group, those acts constitute genocide. That prohibition applies in peace as well as war. Canada cannot answer the genocide accusation by saying it is at peace. In twenty nineteen, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls identified an ongoing genocide rooted in colonial structures. Ongoing. That is our starting point, not a question postponed until the violence becomes history.

03 · 0:50The acts

HannahLook again at the mother, the child, and the hospital bed. These images stand for documented practices, not imaginary categories. The Senate's twenty twenty-two report on forced and coerced sterilization described a practice that persisted and disproportionately harmed Indigenous women and other marginalized groups. In twenty sixteen, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found racial discrimination against First Nations children through inequitable child-welfare services and Canada's implementation of Jordan's Principle. Put those records beside the National Inquiry. Reproduction, family continuity, and survival belong in the same conversation. Open the first evidence file if you want the treaty wording. The question is what power does to people, and what officials continue to authorize after the harm has been documented.

04 · 1:36Who decides

EthanAnd authorization brings us to purpose. The Laundering's case called The Buffalo Jump follows Russell Diabo's analysis of federal policy. He traces a nineteen eighty-five Cabinet submission through later policies sold as self-government, reconciliation, and renewal. His account identifies recurring objectives: shrinking federal obligations, transferring costs to provinces, municipalizing First Nations, and changing the basis of landholding. The archive attributes that continuity analysis to Diabo. Its practical test is sharp: after a new announcement, who actually decides? Who controls the land, the money, and the terms on which a nation may govern itself? A friendlier policy name is not evidence that those powers have been returned.

AdrianThe companion case, The Firewall, shows how responsibility gets divided until the whole structure disappears from view. One office administers funding. Another handles child welfare. Another controls a permit. Each describes a narrow task; the community lives the combined result. The Cleared Ground follows one Treaty Eight case in which cumulative damage to treaty rights could not, on its own, open the appeal gate for a particular approval. That is the structural question: can a process recognize each small decision while failing to confront what they add up to? Indigenous nationhood is not the problem. The problem is a relationship in which recognition leaves the Crown holding decisive power. Separate nations having their own laws is self-determination. Having their authority subordinated is domination.

05 · 0:45The cost

HannahNow open the second file, or zoom in on the large numbers. Eleven years nationally. Eighteen point two in Alberta. These are published gaps in life expectancy, with different population comparisons explained in the file. They are years of human life, not a branding problem. Eleven Years connects unequal survival with institutional records. The numbers alone do not allocate every lost year to a particular policy. Their force is that they make the human consequences impossible to hide behind administrative language. Ask what material conditions allow people to live: housing, safe water, food, care, family, land, and the authority to protect them. When those conditions remain unequal after repeated findings, an apology cannot substitute for changing them.

06 · 0:46The threat file

EthanNow follow the camera down to the blacked-out file. The Threat File examines surveillance of Indigenous political activity under extremism and counterterrorism headings. Canada's security review committee warned that an investigation could cast a shadow of guilt. Notice the reversal: people contesting dispossession become the security problem, while the arrangements they contest are treated as the neutral background. That is why the third file belongs beside the first two. A system can damage a people and then classify their opposition as evidence that more control is necessary. Indigenous peoples have resisted through their own governments, organizing, land defence, language renewal, and collective care. They are political actors. The record should not reduce them to people waiting silently to be rescued.

07 · 1:42Across borders

AdrianThe comparison with Palestine belongs here because it asks the same material questions about territory, movement, family continuity, and who controls the conditions of life. In July twenty twenty-four, the International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful. In September twenty twenty-five, the UN independent commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Those are named findings, not an instruction to wait for a future historian. The archive's Urbancide investigation examines how destroying homes, water systems, hospitals, and neighbourhoods can destroy the possibility of return. Canada and Palestine have distinct histories. The comparison follows mechanisms of domination and dispossession, rather than pretending every event is identical.

HannahThere are also concrete connections beyond comparison. Canada's own description of Operation Proteus says it helps build Palestinian Authority security capacity within a United States-led coordination structure for Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Read that alongside the language of peace and ask whose security defines the mission. In the other direction, The Imported Eye follows surveillance capabilities bought by Canadian police, including Israeli suppliers. Citizen Lab identified possible links between Paragon spyware and the Ontario Provincial Police. The purchasing channel matters: a new capacity to watch or penetrate people's communications arrives as equipment. The question is what authority is being acquired, how it is used, and who can contest it. The connection runs through institutions, contracts, training, and public decisions.

08 · 1:54No peace in the label

EthanSo when we say colonial war, the point is continuity of coercive power, not a requirement that every act look like a battlefield. The state's vocabulary distributes that power into respectable boxes: development, care, security, reconciliation. Put the boxes back together. Ask what the policy protects, whose refusal it overrides, and which community bears the loss. Intent must be examined through decisions, instructions, repeated notice, and the choices made after notice. Harm does not become an accident simply because responsibility is divided among departments. Nor does every bad outcome prove the same legal offence. The work is to connect the documented acts and decisions without allowing procedural fragments to erase the pattern they form.

AdrianReturn to the poster. The dove is above the violence, not an answer to it. The argument you should leave with is this: Canada's peacekeeper identity cannot absolve an ongoing colonial system that harms Indigenous bodies, separates families, erodes land and sovereignty, and watches resistance. The National Inquiry's genocide finding confronts that system in the present tense. The Palestine comparison asks us to apply the same standards across borders, including to Canada's own role. Open the three files in any order. Follow the named investigations: The Buffalo Jump, The Firewall, The Cleared Ground, The Threat File, The Imported Eye, and Urbancide. Their records belong together. Peace must describe how people are allowed to live, not simply what the state calls itself.

AdrianEvery source for this is listed at the end of the page, and every one of them is linked.

EthanIf something here is wrong, it is wrong in the record, and we would want to know. The corrections address is in the footer.

EthanThis was The Peacekeeper's Alibi. A Feline Union publication.